The latest national test scores show that Maryland’s K-12 students are performing below average in math. Maryland’s fourth and eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress placed the state at 39th and 38th out of the 50 states, respectively.

Some may argue that these disappointing results are a call to “get back to basics” in math. But as a math teacher and an education researcher, we’re here to tell you why that’s exactly the wrong answer — especially when your smartphone can do all of the basics faster than any human. Instead, we need to modernize our approach to math education. The State Board of Education’s recently adopted PreK-12 Mathematics Policy pushes us largely in the right direction.

Wait, don’t kids still need to learn the basics? Sure — just like you need to know enough about cars to drive, but probably not enough to build an engine from scratch. In a world where machines can crunch numbers instantly, humans will still use math every day — understanding statistics in news articles, building spreadsheets, figuring out if you can trust the computer’s results, or applying problem-solving skills to everyday problems. These real-world math skills aren’t about memorizing an endless array of procedures; they’re about understanding patterns and relationships.

What Maryland students need is an approach that focuses on conceptual understanding, while building fluency with a few core procedures — exactly the approach laid out in the proposal. Here’s what needs to change to prepare Maryland students with math skills to thrive in today’s world:

1. Update math content: When every phone has a powerful calculator, we should spend less time on computation and more time on helping students make sense of the content. And in today’s digital world, data literacy and statistics are more important than ever — but still largely overlooked. Maryland’s proposal does this by replacing the outdated Algebra/Geometry/Algebra 2 sequence with two years of integrated content grounded in data and focused on conceptual understanding.

2. Change professional development for teachers: Most of us learned in a system that emphasized getting the right answer over understanding concepts. Classes followed an “I do, we do, you do” script.

But as educators, we’ve known that when students are asked to explain their thinking — including what led them to wrong answers — mathematical understanding truly grows. Professional learning that helps teachers leverage mistakes into valuable learning opportunities should be the norm. Though Maryland’s proposed policy is light on the details, professional learning is emphasized throughout the proposal.

3. Assess the system without over-testing kids: The specter of constant testing pushes teachers to drill for right answers instead of focusing on understanding. Testing randomly chosen students, classrooms and schools (like NAEP does) helps us measure progress without subjecting all students to a barrage of tests.

When we do test, AI can help us evaluate student thinking without overburdening our hardworking teachers. Unfortunately, the proposal doesn’t cut back on the testing Maryland’s students face.

4. Attend to attitudes and identities: We know students’ curiosity, motivation, persistence and confidence are critical to student success — and historically ignored in discussions of mathematics. Helping students build positive identities toward math features prominently in the proposal. The addition of interest-driven projects would help build students’ motivation and sense of the content as useful.

Critics will say that shifting away from computational skills lowers standards. Nonsense. It’s more challenging to explain why an answer makes sense than to memorize a procedure. It requires deeper understanding to recognize when technology is getting something wrong than to punch numbers into a calculator. And the problem-solving skills built by tackling hard problems are infinitely more valuable than being able to mimic a teacher’s steps.

Here’s a real-world example: When your data says that some kitchen utensils contain surprisingly large amounts of dangerous chemicals, as happened recently, who is more likely to catch the mistake?

Not the person who memorized the steps to long division but never understood what it meant to divide two numbers. It’s the person who can reason mathematically — who can smell when an answer smells fishy and has the curiosity to determine why.

The latest test scores aren’t telling Maryland schools to go backward to basics.

They’re showing us that we’re still teaching math as if computers didn’t exist.

It’s time to focus on what humans do best — thinking creatively about mathematical relationships, catching errors in machine reasoning and using math to solve real problems. That’s not just better math education; it’s preparation for a world where the basics are just the beginning.

Ulcca Joshi Hansen is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project. Hansen is a futurist and the author of the award-winning book “The Future of Smart.” Dave Kung serves as executive director of Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics and as a coach for high school math teachers in Southern Maryland. Kung spent 21 years as an award-winning mathematics professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.